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Combining Cannabis and Alcohol Amplifies Crash Risks
Cannabis and alcohol are the drugs most commonly detected in the systems of drivers involved in crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Decades of research has looked at the impairing effects of drinking alcohol and driving, but little research has investigated how these two drugs affect behavior behind the wheel when combined. A team of Australian researchers, led by psychological scientist Luke Downey of Swinburne University of Technology, carried out a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment to find out how drivers react when these two drugs are combined.
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Burnout Leaves its Mark on the Brain
Chronic stress seems to dampen people’s neurological ability to bounce back from negative situations—causing even more stress.
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Non-verbal Communication
Nonverbal communication applies across different groups of people and even different species, and it varies within and between individual people, making it a prime candidate for an integrative science initiative, said Anne Maass (Universitá di Padova, Italy), who chaired an Integrative Science Symposium on the topic. Beatrice de Gelder (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) elaborated on cognitive neuroscience research investigating how we perceive emotional expression through the body, even outside awareness, while Klaus Scherer (University of Geneva, Switzerland) discussed the fundamental architecture of the emotion system and how our bodies and faces convey our appraisals of, and intent…
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Psychology in an Economic World
Poverty, wealth, and their cognitive, emotional, and neurochemical consequences dominated the discussion in the opening integrative science symposium at ICPS. Moderated by Daniel Cervone, who co-chairs the program committee for the event that kicked off March 12 in Amsterdam, scientists representing psychology, economics, and sociology shared a wealth of research findings on the various ways socioeconomic status correlates with brain development, decision-making, and emotional well-being. Sociologist Jürgen Schupp of the German Institute for Economic Research detailed the manifold psychological concepts that should factor into the development of relevant social and economic indicators.
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How Brains Think: The Embodiment Hypothesis
Humans understand complex aspects of their day-to-day experience through their bodies, says George Lakoff. The acclaimed cognitive linguist provides a comprehensive look at the nature of embodied structures in the brain and the application of cognitive and neural linguistics.
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Young Children’s Self-Control and the Health and Wealth of Their Nation
Longitudinal data collected from thousands of participants from New Zealand and the United Kingdom show that childhood measures of self-discipline predict everything from personal income to the pace of physiological aging in adulthood, APS Fellow Terrie E. Moffitt reports.
